Coming Up with a Melody Line

Although I don’t know a lot of composers in person, I do know myself fairly well. I know that I sometimes have some trouble coming up with a decent melody line for a musical composition. In most musical compositions, you will want to come up with a meldoy line first, then the bass line to complement it. Of course, that isn’t to say that starting with a basic idea of a bass line isn’t an equally good idea, but don’t expect to be able to come up with a great bass line on the first time through.

Here are some tricks that seem to have worked for me:

Hum a tune aloud: This can be replaced with “whistle a tune” or “come up with a random tune in your head”, but thr results of humming a random tune, if you know how to hum decently, are often quite surprising. Try to remember this tune and write it down. Once you have the first part of a melody, it’s much easier to think of a way to continue it.

Think about something you like: If you think about something you like, especially if it’s part of your surroundings, ideas for a tune, or at least a beat, should come into your head. Try to attach an emotion to the subject. For example, if it’s raining outside, and you like rain, you might want to compose a sort of jumpy (to simpulate raindrops), somewhat happy, somewhat sad musical piece.

Borrow ideas from another piece: You won’t want to steal an entire melody (maybe a part of it which you could add on to) but rather the general timing and beat of a piece. Just take a few bars from a piece you like, and think of another way that same beat could be used to create a slightly different emotion in the listener.

Come up with a bass line first: As I mentioned earlier, if you come up with an interesting bass line, you will eventually think of a good melody line to accompany it.

Practice improvisation: This isn’t a method I use a lot, but once you know of some interesting chords as well as theemotional effects of the chords if you listen to them in a certain order, you can become very good at improvisation. I will elaborate on the ideas of improvisation in the future. However, if you want to use this method, I suggest you record your piano playing on tape or a disc, or whatever you have handy (a phonograph, if that’s all you have, would even suffice). This is because, if you’re like me, you’re likely to forget everything you played shortly after playing it.

Once you have the melody of your piece completed, you can go on to do the bass line. I will probably cover this in the future. Maybe.